Allies Failed To Destroy Iraq Nuclear `Nerve Center,` Un Says

October 08, 1991|By New York Times News Service.

NEW YORK — United Nations inspectors have discovered a complex of buildings that apparently served as the nerve center of President Saddam Hussein`s covert nuclear weapons program but largely escaped allied attack during the Persian Gulf war.

In a report to the Security Council, UN inspectors sent to ferret out Hussein`s nuclear plans said that on their most recent trip to Iraq they found a top-secret document indicating that the hub of Iraq`s weapons-development program was a scientific research installation called Al Atheer, about 40 miles south of Baghdad. It was here, the report says, that Hussein planned

``to design and produce a nuclear device,`` although Iraq has said the installation ``had no nuclear connection.``

Previous inspection teams decided that Al Atheer was probably intended for the production of components for a nuclear weapon.

American and other allied intelligence agencies also apparently failed to spot the importance of this plant, officials say. It was only lightly bombed during the gulf war, with about 15 percent of its buildings hit, far fewer than at many other suspected nuclear sites that were almost completely destroyed.

The allies` failure to destroy this central nuclear installation in the air war against Iraq is a further indication that they underestimated the size of Iraq`s nuclear program and overestimated the damage they had inflicted on it.

The report is based on a partial examination of more than 25,000 secret Iraqi documents, which the inspectors finally managed to remove from the country last month after twice being expelled from the sites where they were collecting material.

The team was then detained for 96 hours in a Baghdad parking lot in Iraq`s most serious confrontation with the Security Council since the end of the war.